I'm running Rise of the Runelords for the first time for my players, we just finished the first chapter Burnt Offerings and are looking forward to the rest of the adventure path.
Two of my players lost their younger sibling in a housefire when they were young in real life, so I'm having misgivings about running the Misgivings chapter in it's entirety.
I plan instead to run the two sidetrek adventures in Wayfinder fanzine's #7 (The Lure of Greed) and #9 (The Gateway to Nar-Voth) both involving Brodart Quink and other local Thassilonian ruins and possibly the sidetrek exploring Chopper's Isle too, to keep the party levels up, and truncate the Misgivings chapter to offer the required info without the potentially damaging reminders of real life trauma.
Does anyone have some suggestions on how to go about this?
In my opinion, you are overthinking this.
However, you will need to replace one haunt that explicitly references the fire. I see three options here. The quick and dirty approach is to ax it and reward the players with an equal amount of story XPs. A second approach would be to replace it with your own custom haunt (something involving Aldern Foxglove finally succumbing to ghoul fever would be good). Or you could write a new encounter outside of the Misgivings to catch them up.
The problem is that the haunt is only a single encounter. Meaning that whatever you come up with will have to be short and sparse on loot. I think a trek out to Chopper's Isle fits those constraints better than exploring Thassilonian ruins.
But, if you do decide to avoid the Misgivings altogether, you'll need to come up with another hideout for The Skinsaw Man while keeping the clues that eventually point the PCs toward Magnimar. For good side encounters, I recommend the first two hardcover volumes of comics--they have a lot of fun stuff set in and around Sandpoint.
I'm running Rise of the Runelords for the first time for my players, we just finished the first chapter Burnt Offerings and are looking forward to the rest of the adventure path.
Two of my players lost their younger sibling in a housefire when they were young in real life, so I'm having misgivings about running the Misgivings chapter in it's entirety.
I plan instead to run the two sidetrek adventures in Wayfinder fanzine's #7 (The Lure of Greed) and #9 (The Gateway to Nar-Voth) both involving Brodart Quink and other local Thassilonian ruins and possibly the sidetrek exploring Chopper's Isle too, to keep the party levels up, and truncate the Misgivings chapter to offer the required info without the potentially damaging reminders of real life trauma.
Does anyone have some suggestions on how to go about this?
Could you perhaps elaborate on which parts of Misgivings is likely to affect your players? Is it the actual fire that's part of the building's history - in which case the suggestion to slightly alter that history and omit haunt references to it are good. Or is it the larger family tragedy spanning multiple generations in the house? That's a lot harder to fix.
In that case I might remove most of the history and it's haunts and make the place a more conventional building filled with undead - ghouls, carrion storms, etc. Leave Iesha. Have the undead goblins roaming the house. Add a zombie or skeleton or two. Perhaps make the Necromancer at Habe's more directly involved working with or exploiting Aldern.
If you drop Misgivings, how would you handle Aldern? How would you tie the other scenarios to Xanesha and the Skinsaw Cult?
Speaking as someone who had an older sister that was run over and killed by her school bus (no, I am not making that up), I agree that you were probably overthinking things. It's trauma, sure, but it's also in the past. Be aware, but don't preempt.
Good, glad it all worked out for you!
I'm glad it worked out for you!
I had a player quit my campaign (amicably) becuse of the subject matter of "The Skinsaw Murders."
The title "The Skinsaw Murders" troubled him. We had an out-of-game chat about the subject matter over a few beers. I told him that it was an investigation-heavy adventure, and the main theme was that the PCs would be tracking down a serial killer. He then asked if the serial killer angle could be changed to something else... and I said, "um, not really."
He then explained that he had lost his taste for any entertainment that involved murder mysteries, especially serial killers. While I'd known that he was a professor of anthropology at a local college, he told me he'd done different work earlier in his career. He then went on to tell me that he had previously been a forensic anthropoligist (think the TV show "Bones," but real-world) working for an international NGO. He said that he'd spent two years back in the early 2000s in El Salvador investigating what the death squads had done during the El Salvador Civil War back the 1980s. He went on to describe finding mass graves and what had been done to the victims before they'd been machine-gunned en masse. He then said that he had been involved with interviews of former death squad memebers, and their stories had chilled him to the bone... so much that he left the field entirely. He concluded that he'd seen enough real-world human depravity and suffering, and wanted his entertainment to be bright and uplifting.
I told him I understood, and that perhaps the themes of this game would not be to his liking.
The wikipedia page about the El Mozote Massacre details what he's talking about. I don't blame anyone being traumatised after getting involved with that. The horrors that humans can exact upon each other exceed our imaginations, fortunately.
Right now i'm putting together an extension to Runelords that partly involves a trip to one of the evil outer planes. I'm attempting to turn it into the darkest most disturbing experience I can. It certainly wouldn't be suitable for anyone with significant past trauma.